Blogging Roller

Noted Java expert, author, and stand-up comedian David Geary uses his new JRoller blog to answer Matt's Raible's complaints about JSF in point-by-point fashion. See also, the Server Side flame-a-thread on Matt's post. Nice to see some spirited discussion of JSF. BTW, I just bought Geary's new JSF book: Core Java Server Faces.

Weblogs have been appearing all over the intranet where I work and I keep hearing about behind-the-firewall blogs at other companies. I've heard of folks who are blogging their weekly status reports, using blogs as personal notebooks at work, and creating newsfeeds for CVS, bug trackers, and other systems. Still, I get the feeling that most weblog-at-work deployments are experimental - just grass roots efforts to put weblogs in place to improve collaboration and communications and to see what happens. Am I wrong about this?

Traction Software sells "enterprise weblog software" and has put together an interesting list of weblog use cases, summarized below. Are you doing any of these uses cases? Are you blogging at work and, if so, what use cases are you finding most useful?

Traction Software's weblog use cases:

• Personal Notebook
• Scientific Research
• Corporate Communications
• Program Management
• Product Management
• Operations Log
• Community of Practice
• Internal News
• Exception Reporting
• Human Resources
• Public, Investor, and Customer affairs
• Account Team Communication
• Law Firms and Litigation Support
• Law Enforcement

Thank goodness for that.

IBM has agreed to release to the open-source Eclipse project key tooling components that until now were exclusively part of the WebSphere Studio product line.  This move is being keenly anticipated as it will greatly enrich Eclipse Development.  Jim Zhang will talk on the new Eclipse Web Tools.

For more information, see the Research Triangle Park Websphere User Group's Web site. Bill Dudney has documented some of the contributions on his Eclipse Live blog.

Happy news today: Lance accepted me as a committer on Atom4J (thanks Lance). I'm going to be helping him to keep Atom4J in line with the developing Atom Format and API specs. Atom4J, by the way, is not just an Atom Format parser, it is also a Atom API server framework. If you want to add Atom API support to your Java-based Web application, all you have to do is to extend the abstract org.osjava.atom4j.servlet.AtomServlet and provide implementions for a handful of abstract methods. I'm interested in adding Atom API client capabilties to Atom4J and I've already made some progress on that front.

Now, on to the less happy part of the story. Atom4J is hosted at OSJava.org in a Subversion archive. This is my first experience with Subversion and getting set up took some time. I ran into some problems on my platform of choice, which is Mac OS X, but I eventually found some level of success. Here's what I did:

• I use Eclipse 3.0 so I installed Subclipse, the Subversion plugin for Eclipse. Unfortunately, I could not get Subclipse to support SSL. I was able to get Subclipse to checkout Atom4J by using HTTP protocol instead of HTTPS, but, because of this, I could not do a commit via Subclipse.


• By default, Subclipse uses it's own Java-based Subversion client implementation, but Subclipse can also be configured to use a command line verison of Subversion if one exists on your computer. So I decided to get the command line version of Subversion.


• I used Fink to install svn with fink install svn. Unfortunately, the version of svn that it installs does not support SSL and is therefore useless to me.


• After some googling around, I found that what I needed was svn-client-ssl, so I tried to get that from fink. Fink told me that I needed system-java14-dev. After some more googling, I found that I needed to re-install the Java SDK so I did. I tried find again and this time Fink told me that it was unable to upgrade db42-ssl-shlibs because it conflicted with db42-shlibs. So I uninstalled db42-shlibs and ran Fink again. Fink cranked away fetching and building for about 45 minutes and died with some other error that I can't remember. At this point, I gave up on Fink for the day.


• Finally, I found a blog entry that pointed me in the right direction. Bill Bumgardner wrote about Martin Ott's pre-built Subversion binaries for Mac OS X. So I downloaded and installed those.


• I went back to Eclipse, configured Subclipse to use my new SSL ready command-line version of Subversion and presto magico, after several hours of flailing around, everything started working.

UPDATE: In his O'Reilly weblog Brian Coyner shows how to build Subversion and Java bindings on Mac OS X. I wonder if his instructions result in an SSL capable client.

Elliot Rusty Harold: I just realized something: Java 1.5, being covered at JavaOne, is code named Tiger. Mac OS X 10.4, being announced across the hall in Moscone is code named Tiger. And I've heard a couple of hints that there's something big and unexpected being announced by Sun next week with regard to Java. Could there be some as yet unreleased big news about a Sun-Apple collaboration?

I'll be at JavaOne this year, my first time ever. I haven't been to a real conference or to San Franciso in a couple of years, so I am pretty excited about the whole deal. I'm looking forward to meeting the Java bloggers, too. For example, I've never met Matt Raible or Russell Beattie or Simon Brown, or any of the other Java bloggers and I hope to change that next week. I also hope to hook up with some of the Sun Bloggers to talk about Roller at Sun. Along those lines: Atlassian is organizing a meetup that looks to be interesting.

I noticed that MyEclipse now supports Eclipse 3.0 RC1, so I downloaded both last night. I must say, I'm impressed. Eclipse looks and feels much better than before on the Mac. Font sizes are reasonable and the theme looks better in some way, but I can't quite put my finger on exactly what it is. Code folding is sweet!

I found an interesting article on Embedding HSQLDB in Eclipse, but what I really want to do is to embed HSQLDB in Tomcat. Is there an easy way to add a "lifecycle" plugin to Tomcat so that HSQLDB is started by Tomcat startup and shutdown by Tomcat shutdown .

Day number two went very well and all of the talks were excellent. I started with David Thomas' Mock Objects talk and Ben Galbraith's SWT talk. After lunch I went to David Geary's advanced JSF talk and ended up the day with Ben Galbraith again with his How to make Swing Sing talk. All of the speakers did an excellent job, covered lots of material, and had very different presentation styles. For example, Galbraith spent most of his talks sitting down in front on an IDE coding up examples and demos on the fly. Geary is a great speaker, but he seems to have a fear of demos. I have seen him speak three times now and every time he has a slightly different reason for not running his live demos. The Javalobby party was nice, with kabobs and baklava and beer and good company. I got to talk to Erik Hatcher for a couple of minutes about Roller's search engine problems and I will attend his Lucene in Action talk today for more insight into this issue.

I'm attending the Triangle Software Symposium this weekend. So far it has been great. I went to David Geary's talk on JSF, Stuart Halloway's talk on Meta-programming and Bruce Tate's talk on Spring. Geary's talk was excellent, but I probably should have atteneded a different talk because it was essentially the same talk he gave to the Tri-JUG a couple of months ago. Halloway's talk was thought provoking and fun. Tate's presentation was good, but the subject matter was less than impressive. He told us that we would be blown away, but at the end, a show of hands proved that few people were even intrigued by Spring.

Today I'm going to focus on UI, as I have been doing in my day job. I'm going to attend David Geary's advanced JSF talk and Ben Galbraith's talks on SWT/JFace and "How to make Swing sing."

I've got to say, the SourceBeat blogs, which are all hosted on JRoller, look great. Here is a list of the active SourceBeat author blogs, RSS feeds, and topics:

• Matt Raible [RSS]: Spring
• Rick Hightower [RSS]: Struts
• James Goodwil [RSS]: Apache Axis
• Bill Dudney [RSS]: Eclipse
• Jonathan Lehr [RSS]: Jakarta Commons

As I have said before: here's to the complainers. Those who care enough to complain are an important asset to any software product. Hani is the king of whiny-ass complainers, of course. He can't do anything except complain, that is the charter of his blog after all and he is locked into his own stinky little cage, but I do still appreciate the constructive criticism that he makes in his recent weblog entry about Roller. Here are the improvements that he suggested, minus the childish and poorly written bile:

• Editor UI: add a dismiss button to the popup calendar
• Editor UI: document plugins in Roller user guide
• Editor UI: provide comment count
• Editor UI: the allow comments on entry flag should default to true (fixed)
• Weblog search: add paging for lengthy search results
• Weblog search: problem with search results?
• Main page: Font sizes too large on main page (fixed)
• Main page: List weblog name rather than user name in hot blogs list (fixed)
• Main page: Provide option to view main page with out excerpts
• Edit user page: default locale to en and timezone to America/New_York (fixed)

We will be deploying new Roller 0.9.9 builds to JRoller over the next couple of weeks and we may have the opportunity to make some of these improvements, but these are not the only problems we are tracking and the all-volunteer Roller development team has limited time to commit to Roller. If you really want to make Roller better, it's up to you. Roller is open source software and you can help to make it better by filing bug reports and suggestions to Roller's JIRA issue tracker, by submitting patches, and by helping out with documentation on the Roller Wiki.

Roller is the most popular and successful weblogging software among Java bloggers, was recently chosen by Sun to power blogs.sun.com, and is enjoyed by thousands of webloggers worldwide. Join us, help to ensure Roller's continued success, and make a difference in the open source Java community.

VeloEclipse is a fork of the, apparently inactive, VeloEdit project that has been updated to work in Eclipse 3.0 M8 and later.

New JRoller blogger Vlad Hanciuta posts some first impressions of Eclipse 3.0 M9.

In case you missed it, Don Brown took my Control Flow meets JSP proof-of-concept and kicked it up a notch. He implemented Struts Flow and made it part of the Struts Applications project on SourceForge.

Turn off the LAMP and crack open an ice cold PBR - Pebble, Blojsom, or Roller that is. You're a Java developer so drink your own brew. If you don't like the taste, then join one of those open source Java weblogging projects and start brewin' for yourself.

I've got too many other things going on right now to resume my work on Control Flow, so I'm happy to report that Don Brown has picked up where I left off and has integrated Cocoon's Control Flow module into a Struts application.

Don implemented the same number guess example that I did, but with Struts, by replacing my Flow Servlet with a Flow Action. This is a different approach than I was considering. I was under the impression that the only way to enable Control Flow to take advantage of Struts Form Bean processing and Validation was to integrate Control Flow at the ActionServlet level. On second thought, I think the Flow Action approach will work fine, but it will require that Actions that are to participate in the flow extend the Flow Action Flow Servlet. I'm looking forward to seeing Don's code.

Tim Bray: Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. We need to do a better job of telling the world. As of now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first (but please do read and follow the advice in this note). Blogging is a good way to do this...

Bravo!

Yes I will, but don't hold your breath. I've got a lot on my plate now. I've been starting to run in the mornings again, after my usual winter lapse, so I have had some time to think about the problem of integrating my hacked-free version of Cocoon Control Flow into a Struts application. I'll try to write up my thoughts on the topic in the next couple of days, because it may be while before I have time to code up a solution.